Boom bap is the classic hip hop sound of the late 1980s and 1990s: a hard, swung drum loop with a booming kick and a cracking snare, short chops of old soul, funk and jazz records for the melody, a deep simple bass, and a warm, dusty, slightly lo-fi finish. Here is what each part is and how they fit together.
Works in any DAW, with any sampler or synth. Nothing here needs a particular plugin.
Boom bap is a classic style of hip hop from the late 1980s and 1990s, mostly on the US East Coast. It is named after the sound of its drums, the boom of the kick and the bap of the snare. The whole style is built around that hard, swung drum loop, with short chops of old records laid over the top for the melody and chords.
If you have heard the drums on records from producers like DJ Premier or Pete Rock, that hard, swung, sample-based sound is the style most people point to, though it runs well beyond any one name.
The parts are fairly consistent from track to track:
The feel is heavy and head-nodding rather than fast, and most of what makes it boom bap lives in a small set of choices:
| Element | Typical | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo | around 85 to 95 BPM | Slow enough to hear every hit, with a heavy nod |
| Drums | Hard, swung break | A booming kick and a cracking snare on the backbeat |
| Swing | MPC-style, offbeats late | The human bounce that keeps it off a stiff grid |
| Samples | Soul, funk, jazz chops | Short pieces of old records for melody and chords |
| Bass | Deep and simple | One low root note per chord, following the sample |
| Character | Warm, dusty, lo-fi | Vinyl and old-sampler wear laid over everything |
Program a hard, punchy backbeat, a heavy kick on beat 1 and a cracking snare on beats 2 and 4, then add an MPC-style swing so the groove bounces instead of marching. The drums are where the head-nod comes from, so they are worth getting right before anything else.
A heavy kick lands on beat 1, often with a second, syncopated kick nearby, and a cracking snare or rimshot lands on beats 2 and 4, with hi-hats filling the gaps. That kick is the boom and that snare is the bap. The backbeat, snare on 2 and 4, is the same spine as any hip hop beat, written up in how to make hip hop beats. A lot of boom bap drums come from a sampled break, chopped into single hits and replayed, then roughed up so they hit hard.
Swing is what gives boom bap its bounce. Push the offbeats slightly late so they land behind the grid; a swing setting somewhere around 54 to 62 percent is a common starting point. The classic samplers had their own swing feel baked in, which is a big part of why old beats sit the way they do. A beat quantized dead to the grid tends to sound stiff, so let the kit lean back a touch while you keep one element, usually the kick, steady as an anchor. The tempo usually sits around 85 to 95 BPM, slow enough to hear every hit.
Loop just the drums for a minute and go do something else. If your head starts moving on its own, the groove is there. If it does not, the fix is in the kick, the snare and the swing, not in piling more layers on top.
Take a short piece of an old soul, funk or jazz record, or a phrase you play yourself, and chop it into slices you can replay, so a few seconds of sound becomes the melody and the chords at once. For a lot of boom bap this chop is the whole musical hook.
Slice the sample into pieces and replay them in a new order, or trigger only the slices you want, so the phrase becomes your arrangement rather than a straight lift. Chopping on the beat is also how you lock the sample to the drums. Pitching the chop up or down can move it into the key of your track or thicken it, and a low-pass filter rolls the top off so it tucks under the drums. Keep the loop short and let it repeat, since the repetition is part of the pull.
Under the chops sits a deep, simple bass. Usually one low, round note per chord, following the root of the sample's harmony, with maybe a short walk up into the next chord. The one rule that matters is to stay out of the kick's way in the low end, or the bass and the kick fight and the bottom of the mix turns to mud.
A sample is someone else's recording, and boom bap was built on samples, so this matters here as much as anywhere. If you sample a record you do not have permission to use, that is copyright infringement, no matter how much you chop or filter it. So work from material you are allowed to use: your own recordings, royalty-free or properly licensed sample packs, or a part you play in yourself. A lot of the sound comes from how you chop and age it, not from whose record it came off.
Age everything with vinyl and old-sampler wear, so a clean recording sounds like it came off a worn record. In boom bap this warm, dusty, slightly lo-fi quality is a big part of the style, not just a finishing touch.
Everything gets warmed and roughed up rather than left clean and bright:
Ageing a loop with tape and vinyl wear is the whole basis of lo-fi, a close cousin of boom bap, and it has its own walkthrough in how to make a lo-fi beat. Modern producers get this feel from drum breaks, swing and saturation while working only from sounds they are allowed to use, which keeps the character without the copyright risk.
Most of a boom bap beat is quick to program. The part that is genuinely hard to fake by hand is the warm, dusty, slightly wobbly texture underneath: a chop or a chord that keeps moving and wearing out so it never sounds like the same clean two bars pasted end to end.
SILT is a generative tape-loop instrument. Feed a chord, a sample or a melody in and it smears it with tape wow, flutter, dust and dropout, turning a clean part into the warm, dusty, slightly wobbly texture that boom bap lives on. It runs in the browser, or as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX and a standalone.
It works on your own material, so the character comes from a part you are allowed to use. It does not program your drums or write your bass; it makes the aged, wobbling layer that the rest of the beat sits on.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. Everything above still works by hand in any DAW, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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